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What Artifact used to be

Artifact started with something I called “the work around the work.” I wanted to help freelancers and creative people spend less time on invoices, contracts, and proposals. I hated doing that part myself, so it felt like an obvious place to start. More than 100 people signed up. Some tried it and gave me feedback, and I’m grateful they took the time. It never reached the point where anyone paid for it.

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Why I pivoted

The conversations helped me understand what people were already doing. Some worked on retainers, so they weren’t making new proposals or invoices very often. Some used platforms that handled the paperwork. For an occasional invoice, asking Claude could be enough. Then I looked at my own behavior. When I needed an invoice, I was using Mercury. For the freelancers I’d chosen to build for, this wasn’t painful enough to make Artifact something they needed. I decided to stop building that version. While building it, I kept running into another problem. My own product was spread across repository docs, Notion, Linear, Figma, and different branches. Keeping track of what I’d decided, why I’d decided it, and whether the work still followed it was getting difficult. At one point I made an overview in Figma called Eyebird, just so I could zoom out and see the product again. I stopped using it after about a week. I still can’t say for sure why. Keeping it current may have been too much work; that’s something to understand, not a conclusion I’ve proved. There was also a point where I’d decided to focus on small micro-agencies, then found myself building for freelancers without explicitly revisiting that decision. The work had moved, and I hadn’t really stopped to look at what that meant.

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What’s the next direction

I still care about the work around the work. I’d started by looking at paperwork. The work I’m focused on now is staying clear on what you’re building as decisions, designs, agent sessions, and feedback keep moving. The first shape of the new Artifact was a Mac app where you deliberately save what matters, and the system helps keep the project’s direction current. The decisions stay yours. Now we’re exploring how much of that understanding can come from the work itself. If a product question moves through Figma, an agent session, an implementation, and customer feedback, can Artifact keep track of how those pieces relate? Can it understand which version the feedback concerns, what has changed, and when something deserves your attention? The idea is for those connections to be maintained in the background, with the useful parts showing up when you need them. We still have to prove that enough evidence is available, that the connections are reliable, and that the help is worth the effort and trust it asks of you. That’s where we are. The questions and assumptions are here so you can follow the thinking as it changes. I’ll share working prototypes alongside it. I’m keeping notes from conversations too: what stayed with me, what I’m unsure about, and what changes as I go. Join the waitlist if you’d like to try Artifact as it takes shape.